Free online courses shake up the world of post-secondary education

Tracy Sherlock, Vancouver Sun11.04.2013

MOOCs are mostly video-based courses that teach complex subjects and attract tens of thousands of people who interact during the course, solving problems and discussing issues. Individuals who complete the course don’t typically gain a traditional university credit but they usually receive a certificate of completion.

Imagine studying artificial intelligence for robotics with a Stanford University instructor or discussing the moralities of everyday life with a Yale University professor.

Not only can anyone enrol in classes like these, but they are offered free of cost and on the Internet. They’re called MOOCs: massive online open classes, and they’re shaking up the world of post-secondary education.

When the University of British Columbia offered its first MOOC this May, 130,000 people from around the world signed up.

While only 8,000 people completed the four-week game theory class, that’s still an impressive number by any university class standard.

MOOCs are mostly video-based that teach complex subjects and attract tens of thousands of people who interact during the course, solving problems and discussing issues. Individuals who complete the course don’t typically gain a traditional university credit but they usually receive a certificate of completion.

Kevin Leyton-Brown, associate professor of computer science at UBC, created and ran the game theory class in partnership with Stanford University.

“130,000 people cared about this,” Leyton-Brown said. “This is graduate-level math. I had more students in Canada take this course than I’ve taught in the 10 years I’ve been at UBC.”

Leyton-Brown teaches a similar in-person class for graduate students at UBC, which usually attracts about 20 students.

“People start noticing when all around the world, interesting, engaged people who really want to learn — they’re not doing this to get marks, they’re just doing it because they want to learn — show up in these kinds of numbers,” Leyton-Brown said. “Something surprising is happening here.”

Don Krug, a professor in the Faculty of Education at UBC, said some people view MOOCs as a “disruptive innovation” but he believes they are a “sustainable innovation” that universities can use to bolster what they already offer for online education.

“Institutions of higher education have a financial market associated with learning. That type of system is that the students come and they take classes and get credit for those classes and get a degree,” Krug said. “MOOCs have the potential to disrupt that and say students can just take courses anywhere, anytime they want, and they won’t need to have the degree.

“Universities have decided that MOOCs are important, but they want to have them be part of how they’ve already set up their economic structures, so they are using them to sustain what they already do as a form of online learning.”

So far, there is not a lot of money in MOOCs, but the potential is impressive. If 130,000 people each paid even as little as $10 for Leyton-Brown’s course, that would be $1.3 million. At this point, most MOOCs do not offer traditional university credits, but students can sometimes opt to pay for a credit course offered alongside a MOOC.

“The most exciting thing is that a lot of people are getting free education of a very high quality from some of the best schools in the world and they’re succeeding in matching up people who care about something unusual with people who have a passion for it,” Leyton-Brown said.

So what’s in it for UBC?

“That’s a really good question. I think UBC doesn’t know what’s in it for UBC,” Leyton-Brown said. “There’s a sense that something cataclysmic and important is happening in education. I think (UBC) thought that if they did zero in this space that they’d be missing the bus.”

The university also gains name recognition on a very large scale, he said.

“What’s also in it for UBC is marketing and brand awareness — making students all over the world who are good know about UBC and become interested in it,” Leyton-Brown said. “Ultimately, there’s the prospect that someday the universities might make money from doing this. If UBC only tries to get into the game at that point, it might be too late.”

Krug said the university determines which courses to offer via MOOCs based on the areas they want the world to know they’re experts in. The choices are not random, and could help the university recruit top students who’ve done very well in a particular course in a specific field, from any country in the world.

Krug said there is worldwide demand for access to higher education, and 120 million students are going to want to take higher education courses online by 2020.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that a 15-year-old boy from Mongolia aced a MOOC offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in circuits and electronics. He is now attending MIT.

Possibilities exist for profit from MOOCs, such as charging for a “signature track” certification in which students write exams in person at a testing centre where their identity is verified. Another possibility is that companies or recruiters could pay for lists of the top students in particular courses, Leyton-Brown said, adding that it cost about $15,000 to set up the MOOC.

Assessment in MOOCs is mostly done using multiple choice tests that are marked by a computer, Leyton-Brown said. Although he was initially skeptical about this type of assessment, after running the MOOC, he says he doesn’t think it was all that different from an assessment done in a classroom.

“It’s not as different as I expected,” Leyton-Brown said. “I think getting a good grade in a MOOC requires a better understanding than I might have imagined.”

The videos prepared for the MOOC can also be used in his in-person class so students can prepare ahead of time, with the ability to stop, rewind and replay any parts of a lecture that they don’t understand, and then focus in-class time on problem solving and group work instead of lectures, he said.

UBC has now offered five MOOCs, all hosted through the online platform Coursera. Udacity is another platform offering MOOCs; both for-profit platforms are funded by venture capital and offer hundreds of classes from universities around the world. The UBC MOOC was the second-largest ever run by Coursera and the first that was co-hosted by two universities, Leyton-Brown said.

“I think it’s an experiment. UBC has not decided to completely reorganize the university around MOOCs, but I think they’re putting their toe in the water and seeing where this takes them,” Leyton-Brown said.

Leyton-Brown and Krug both took part in September in a panel discussing the challenges and opportunities presented by MOOCs as part of the Conference of the University-Based Institutes for Advanced Study (UBIAS) at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.

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